‘How do you know?’ I turned to him, very surprised at this sudden revival of Helen’s infidelities, this intimacy with her affairs in the words of a total stranger who, he seemed to suggest, had long ago known more about her than I ever had.
‘I told you — we have evidence. Some reports we found in his suitcase.’ He spoke to one of the other men in Russian and I was brought back a green folder with a number of typewritten, yellowing sheets inside.
They were the reports the detectives in East Africa had made out for Guy on his wife’s affair with Graham six years before — the reports which Guy had told me he had destroyed but hadn’t. I glanced through them. They seemed all the shabbier now, the hard, business-like words describing a passion fulfilled between two people for the delectation of a third. And I saw them as Guy’s death-warrant somehow; it was this obsession that no one could live with, but which he had been unable to lose, which had killed him: that spying on real life — however divisive — and not his official espionage, which had led to his end.
It was obvious, with his keeping this evidence close to him, the memory of her infidelity always green in the green folder, that he had never intended, would never have been able, to forgive or forget — that his obsessive illness had condemned him to hold everything against her to the end: the literal documents of their failure and her success, with which he could continue to indict her throughout the remains of their marriage. He had wanted to punish himself, I suppose, more than her: that ‘deep sense of failure’ he had told me about a month before upstate. And her words too came back to me: ‘You fell down a hole in yourself a long time ago.’ Jackson was involved in that old bitter story: if love was not mutual, then at least the punishment would be.
And that was something I might somehow make up for with her, on Guy’s behalf, I thought — put his marriage right for him — which was so important a thing, I felt, that a man might sense the happy change even in his grave.
I glanced at one of the reports, dated ‘Nairobi, 17th September, 1965.’
… he signed the register at the Tsavo National Park game-lodge as ‘Mr and Mrs Graham’ at 4.35 p.m. on September 10th. The two parties then went immediately to cabin number 27 at the end of the northern spur. They returned to the lounge of the main building at 6.05 p.m. where they ordered drinks — two local Crown lagers for him and two whisky-waters for her. Afterwards they had the set dinner on the terrace, with a single flask of Chianti. They adjourned to their cabin at 10.25 p.m. Our man was unable to …
How prosaic. Yet Guy’s jealous obsession had thrived on just this sort of thing, I thought, since before we can properly imagine any act of infidelity we must have the precise bricks and mortar of the setting.
And in this way Helen’s past rose up for me again in these reports, as it must have done for Guy. Here was an outline of all those mysterious intentions in her life, a rough map of the forces which had ruined him and whose effects I was now to inherit. Somewhere behind these bleak pages, as beyond the arid descriptions of Margaret Takazze’s novel, lay the real woman, untouched. Imprisoned by these walls of contrivance and deceit was a beleaguered mind, full of joy, frantically unexpressed.
‘Read it all,’ the little man advised. ‘Carefully. On your journey. They give great insight into the woman you’re married to — the woman you’re seeing tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon. Your wife.’
14
It was an absolutely still and fine afternoon when I got to England next day, watching the manicured land run away from the train I’d picked up at Reading for Cheltenham, sitting in an empty first-class compartment in one of Guy’s best Savile Row pin-stripes, wearing an equally anonymous striped old boys’ tie: an endless hazy blue sky over the neat green pastures and gentle tree-filled rises of the Thames Valley, the corn run to a final blackened gold and ready to burst, the leaves of huge chestnuts by the river a dusty, pendulous green. We got to Cheltenham two hours later.
I had heard about Regency Cheltenham, the Spa town, the Promenade, the fine trees and gracious terraces, but had never been there. And it was a place, I saw from the taxi on my way from the station, which just, but only just, retained an air of Georgian grandeur, aristocratic conceits, the graceful, decorative arts of a pleasure-filled era, a hundred and fifty years before.
Presently we emerged from the town centre, past a garden pub at a busy crossroads, a children’s hospital, a straggle of ugly pebble-dashed suburban villas which gradually died out as the road went higher. And then quite suddenly, the buildings ended and we were in the yellow evening country, with a farm and fields and a herd of Friesians away to our left, running down the hill to where the hazy town lay like a street-plan beneath us.
And now, about half a mile away, beneath a reservoir and next to a large cemetery, I saw something I thought I recognised from a series of photographs I’d been shown by the Russians in New York: a group of war-time Nissen huts surrounded by a high fence, a large cark park, and in the centre, a long, three-storied redbrick building with a lot of glass windows and a tall, power-station chimney at one end: a building like a strange ship moored far away from the roads of the town, tucked into the side of the chalk escarpment. I thought of asking the driver what it was. But there was no need. It could only be the Government Communications Headquarters in Oakley Park. The Russians had carefully pointed it out on a map they’d shown me in New York — an expanse of anonymous buildings on the outer suburbs of the town, between the reservoir and the cemetery.
And now I knew too how far we’d got on our journey, for they’d shown me, on the same map, where the house in the hills was which the Jacksons had taken, about three miles above the town. It would have to be there, up in front of us, in the ridge of thick trees that lay on the horizon, and it would have a perfect view, I realised, not only of the town but also of my future office.
And then, as I realised how close I must be now to Helen, I was suddenly terrified. The whole perfect landscape threatened me, and I knew that the coming words could only be words of pain. The journey was at an end, when one had slept with tiredness, suspended above action. And now the only action I wanted was that of escape; I longed to tell the taxi man to drive on forever. I looked back down the hill. And, yes, there was a car behind us, a Jaguar saloon a hundred yards away. Was it following us? I couldn’t tell. But it seemed to push us forward inexorably. And I had a sudden vision of firing at it, blowing it clean out of the golden day, as if in a film or a story. But in such fiction one would have had a gun, of course, and realising that I didn’t, I felt the full weight of the reality that I was living through.
The road narrowed and twisted and became very steep. The Jaguar had dropped away behind us and then I couldn’t see it any more. We passed into the tree belt I’d seen from below: at first, immediately beside the road, a long line of ancient, twisted copper beeches, and beyond them a mixture of woods, deciduous and conifer — old ruined copses, and a new forest, a plantation of fir that seemed to run over most of the brow of the hill. It was a strangely deserted area for somewhere so close to the town, without farms or habitation, almost dark in the bright evening light. And dead still. The driver paused at a small crossroads near the top. Ahead of us was open common, but we were still in the trees, their shadows casting long marks on the dazzling road beyond. He wound down the window. A bird twittered suddenly. And I could hear it, quite clearly, running away into the woods, its foot-steps like an animal crackling over the dry mould of leaves.
‘It must be down there,’ he said, looking along a stony track that led off to our left, gradually sloping down the hill again.